George Armitage Miller

George Armitage Miller, born in 1920 and living until 2012, was an American psychologist who helped launch both cognitive psychology and the broader field of cognitive science. He also played a key role in starting psycholinguistics. Among his achievements, Miller wrote multiple books and oversaw the creation of WordNet, an online database that links words together and can be used by computer programs. He is best known for his paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," where he pointed out that a range of experiments collectively suggest people can hold about seven items in short-term memory. That paper remains widely cited by psychologists and in popular culture. Miller received many honors, including the National Medal of Science.

When Miller began his career, behaviorism dominated psychology, focusing only on observable actions and avoiding the study of mental processes. Miller rejected that approach. He created experimental methods and mathematical tools to examine mental processes, especially speech and language. He spent most of his career at Harvard University, MIT, and Princeton University. He became a founder of psycholinguistics and a key figure in establishing cognitive science. He worked with and co-authored papers with other major figures, such as Noam Chomsky. For shifting psychology toward the study of mental processes and linking it to information theory, computation, and linguistics, Miller is regarded as one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century. A 2002 survey ranked him as the 20th most cited psychologist of that era.

Miller was born on February 3, 1920, in Charleston, West Virginia, to George E. Miller, a steel company executive, and Florence Armitage Miller. His parents divorced soon after his birth, and he lived with his mother during the Great Depression. He attended public school and graduated from Charleston High School in 1937. He then moved with his mother and stepfather to Washington, D.C., and spent a year at George Washington University. His family practiced Christian Science, relying on prayer rather than medicine for healing. After his stepfather was transferred to Birmingham, Alabama, Miller transferred to the University of Alabama. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in history and speech in 1940 and a Master of Arts in speech in 1941, both from the University of Alabama. He later received a Master of Arts in psychology in 1944 and a Ph.D. in psychology in 1946 from Harvard University.

At the University of Alabama, his involvement in the Drama club sparked his interest in speech courses. Professor Donald Ramsdell introduced him to psychology. As a graduate student at Harvard, he worked in the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory under Stanley Smith Stevens, researching military voice communications for the Army Signal Corps during World War II. His doctoral thesis, "The Optimal Design of Jamming Signals," was classified top secret by the U.S. Army.

After earning his doctorate, Miller stayed at Harvard as a research fellow, continuing his work on speech and hearing. He became an assistant professor of psychology in 1948. The course he developed on language and communication led to his first major book, *Language and Communication* (1951). In 1950, he took a sabbatical as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to study mathematics. There he befriended J. Robert Oppenheimer and played squash with him. In 1951, Miller joined MIT as an associate professor of psychology, leading the psychology group at the MIT Lincoln Lab. He worked on voice communication and human engineering, identifying the minimal voice features needed for speech to be intelligible. Based on this work, he gave a talk at the Eastern Psychological Association in 1955, which later became his famous paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two."

Miller returned to Harvard as a tenured associate professor in 1955 and became a full professor in 1958, expanding his research into how language affects cognition. At Harvard, he met a young Noam Chomsky, another founder of cognitive science. They spent a summer together at Stanford, sharing a house with their families. In 1958–59, Miller took leave to join the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California. There he collaborated with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram on the book *Plans and the Structure of Behavior*. In 1960, with Jerome S. Bruner, he co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard, a break from behaviorism, which considered cognition unfit for study. The center attracted visitors like Jean Piaget, Alexander Luria, and Chomsky. Miller later became chair of the psychology department. He was instrumental in recruiting Timothy Leary to teach at Harvard, having known Leary from the University of Alabama, where Miller taught and Leary earned his undergraduate degree.

In 1967, Miller taught as a visiting professor at Rockefeller University. From 1968 to 1979, he was a professor there, and he continued as an adjunct professor from 1979 to 1982. After a new president was elected at Rockefeller, Miller moved to Princeton University as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor.